Daily Times

Women under capitalism are not only the source of cheapest labor, but have become a socialized sexual object too. In an advertisement, it is hard to discern what is for sale, an inanimate object or a charming animated beauty, paid to promote it.

‘Physician thy heal yourself’, a Biblical phrase improvised by mercurial Nietzsche became more meaningful with an apocalyptical addition,” Let … the patient, may behold with his eyes the man who heals himself’. The phrase is more relevant to the people of Pakistan where everyone despite being an incurable patient considers oneself, a messiah.

People in Pakistan are the victims of a widespread illusive belief that the state is promenading on the path of enlightenment. The sagacious response of the rulers against the Indian aggression and returning of Indian pilot is the evidence offered to support the state’s maturity. However, the massive defence spending, privatization of public enterprises and ever-increasing number of missing persons who vanished in thin air, never to be found again present an altogether different reality.

Some four decades ago, Pakistan chose to tread on the primrose path to self-destruction, and in the name of jihad entered Afghan imbroglio. Soon it was completely sucked in by the abyss, and until now finds little or no intentions or appetite to wade out. The establishment went to cast out a devil (the USSR) with the help of a God fearing Satan (the US) but without heeding to Nietzsche’s advice that ‘Not a few who sought to cast out their devil entered into the swine themselves’.

Prior to becoming a frontline state of imperialist might, the working class of Pakistan suffered an existential crisis in the shape of loss of Bengal, the decisive factor in its struggle to win a battle for a better world. Losing politically active and class-conscious allies left the workers both in bewilderment and in the wilderness. They were alone and lonely and an enlightened civilian martial-law administrator proved a terrible company. The much-hyped age of enlightenment of a New Pakistan under Bhutto turned out to be the continuation of the age of savagery; the non-conformists, the Reds, the Bloch became the others. Zia, a mercenary on prayer mat imposed the laws of the medieval era with cave -man’s mindset; women too were included in the pariah’ list.

Despite the mayhem, the bruised, mutilated and checkered process of the country’s history continued to move ahead. The direct Bonapartismand/or the civilian Cesarism not only produced a filthy rich military bourgeoisie but an equally corrupt civilian stratum, betrothed with the former. With, the emergence of a capitalist- class the conditions became congenial for a highly ambitious and opportunist middle class to find room to garner its clay feet. Despite religious repression, capitalism has little appetite to leave any sphere unscathed; it forms or deforms the relations according to its inscrutable laws. Marx, in the Communist Manifesto, the Bible of the working class, has identified this crucial factor.

Women under capitalism are not only the source of cheapest labor, but have become a socialized sexual object too. In an advertisement, it is hard to discern what is for sale, an inanimate object or a charming animated beauty, paid to promote it

On the eve of women day the historic slogan of liberty, equality, fraternity the reminders of French bourgeois finally echoed in the bigger cities of Pakistan. It was a bourgeois expression of changing relations in a religiously tabooed society. Ironically, no one not even those in chains raising their objective despair realized either the origin of the sloganor the significance of the day. Incidentally, both owed their existence to Clara Zatkin, a Marxist revolutionary and the working women of the world. The ignorance of the protesting women preserved no element of shock since the majority either belonged to the class of expropriators or was the product of the so-called trickle down effect.

In Pakistan, the changing objective conditions have forced the ruling class to yield space to the liberal but apparently non-political voices of the society, whose face the modern enlightened woman is. There is an ongoing debate about the jotted down slogans on the placards. To a certain group, they were commonplace, obscene, uncultivated and even un-women. The claim is as senseless as it is bizarre. When every obscenity is Kosher to man, the authority to decide what un-woman is, become unauthentic.

Even the concept of obscenity requires a redefinition. Obscene is not a woman who highlights her private parts in public, obscene is a general who takes the people to war, obscene is a politician who says ‘we’ and means ‘I’, a recondite crime for Adorno. Both obscenity and nudity are not neutral terms. They are the instruments of the powerful to stifle the voices of dissent, the voices of heretics who can see with their own eyes, though heretics themselves are not the sole monopolists of truth.

‘It is the invention of clothes and not nature that made private parts private’. Mother Nature does not discern between the various parts of the human body since it creates a human being as its child, and no mother is ashamed of the nudity of its child. Nudity itself is a protest of a weaker segment, left with no other form of denial; the hipsters, the clown and the prostitute become the symbol of protest when political reality is false or coercive beyond tolerance. It is desperate laughter of a rebel, an act of an impotent rebellion.

In late capitalism, the language itself has not only become a tool of dominance but also a sign of capitulation. For Adorno, the proletarian language is dictated by hunger; the poor chew their words, what if the language of the affluent becomes violent and offensive hence unpalatable, an indirect gratification consequent upon the debasement of sexuality itself? ‘In this unconscious debasement of sexuality the radical seems to punish himself, for his lack of power, his language loses its political impact’ (Marcuse).

‘All liberation depends on the consciousness of servitude’ but the emergence of consciousness can be hampered by lack of identification of the real enemy. The slogans against the patriarchy portrayed the half-truth since the conditions creating patriarchy were completely ignored. That makes capitalistic feminism a farce; it conceals the domination of the hegemonic group in the production.

This does not mean that the struggle for women’s liberation is futile and can be postponed until the revolution. Every movement has its class basis, no matter which class takes up emancipation. Yet there is another dimension to it, no movement has ever succeeded without the participation of the working class, which is an immutable reality. Women under capitalism are not only the source of cheapest labor, but have become a socialized sexual object too. In an advertisement, it is hard to discern what is for sale, an inanimate object or a charming animated beauty, paid to promote it. By transforming her biological constitution into ethical and cultural value, both capital and religion remain hand in glove in the exploitation of women. Her image as mother is highly repressive since it negates her humanity and transforms her into a mere instrument of reproduction.

Every liberation presupposes the emergence of a new sensitivity, which rejects not only the repressive elements of the established society but the premeditated pleasures it offers since pleasures of regressive society demand escape from the ‘last remaining thought of resistance’. The liberation of man from machismo & misogyny will also be a precondition of women’s liberation, a sweeping change in human behavior, which according to Marx will build the object world in accordance with the laws of beauty. Such a noble idea will only materialize once the inhuman system of laws of exchange is overthrown. Does someone say socialism?

Published in Daily Times, March 20^th 2019.